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Frostburg State University assistant professor of English Andy Duncan has been named the winner of the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. This prestigious annual award goes to the best science fiction or fantasy novelette published in the United States during the previous year. Duncan won the award for his novelette, “Close Encounters.” “A Nebula Award, in any category, is the highest peer award in science fiction, and I am deeply touched and grateful to know that my fellow science fiction writers so admire what I do,” Duncan said.

Duncan, who recently won the FSU Faculty Achievement Award for Academic Achievement, has been nominated for the Nebula Awards seven times. His collection of fiction, “Beluthahatchie and Other Stories,” has won a World Fantasy Award. Another of his five books, “The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories,” contains the Nebula Award-winning “Close Encounters” and the World Fantasy Award-winning “The Pottawatomie Giant.” Duncan has also won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his novella, “The Chief Designer,” and has been nominated for the Hugo Awards multiple times.

The Nebulas are voted on and hosted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the nonprofit association of professionally published science fiction and fantasy writers founded in 1965. The Best Novelette award has been awarded annually since 1966. Past winners of the award include the renowned Isaac Asimov and George R.R. Martin, the author of the books upon which the HBO television series “Game of Thrones” is based.

Duncan plays a dual role of English faculty and professional writer. “Being a professional science fiction writer is like being part of the smartest, funniest, most diverse and extended family imaginable; we're all in touch with one another, online, every day, cheering and squabbling and ‘squeeing’ about something, from teenage aspirants to Grand Masters in their 90s,” he said. “I've had a ball doing it for 19 years now, and I hope to keep doing it the rest of my life – which science fiction reminds us might last, oh, millennia, if we can work out that data-storage problem.”

For more information on FSU’s Department of English, visit www.frostburg.edu/dept/engl.

Situated in the mountains of Allegany County, Frostburg State University is one of the 12 institutions of the University System of Maryland. FSU is a comprehensive, residential regional university and serves as an educational and cultural center for Western Maryland. For more information, visit www.frostburg.edu or facebook.com/frostburgstateuniversity. Follow FSU on Twitter @frostburgstate.